Score a small victory for Android users. Earlier this year, LinkedIn killed a clever app called Intro, which used an engineering hack to inject information from LinkedIn and its Rapportive service into your iOS emails. But the service was deemed too risky for the way it intercepted emails on behalf of users before augmenting them with the additional data, and was later shut down.
Today, however, select Android users will have access to similar functionality, the company says. Those who buy the newly released Galaxy S5 smartphone will have the ability to access LinkedIn data from not only their email, but also their calendar and contacts applications.
In a blog post announcing this news, LinkedIn touts this as a “first-of-its-kind integration,” explaining that they’ve teamed up with Samsung to make this possible. Unlike on iOS devices, where LinkedIn had to hack its way around the fact that Apple doesn’t offer an extensible framework, the partnership with Samsung means that, this time around, LinkedIn no longer needs to intercept your emails in order to inject its code.
To get started, Galaxy S5 users will need to download the LinkedIn application to their new handset, then authorize the native applications to sync with their LinkedIn account. After doing so, they’ll then be able to view the same sort of profile data Intro once offered iOS device owners, including LinkedIn users’ profile pictures, job titles, and work experience.
But instead of only appearing in the email client, this data is also available in the Calendar and Contacts app, too, allowing you to pre-brief yourself or refresh your memory about those you’re soon meeting with, or get an update on your contacts’ latest news from the native Contacts app.
We’ve asked LinkedIn if it’s working on any way to bring this functionality to a wider number of Android users through additional integrations to be rolled out in the future (Samsung or otherwise), but haven’t yet heard back. We’ll update with that info, as provided.
More here.